Scarlett giggled suddenly. “This is stupid, Pax. Why are we arguing? You’re alive for fuck’s sake! You did it!”
“Yeah.” Pax looked around his mother’s apartment. “I did, didn’t I?”
“We’re both alive,” said Scarlett. “And I’ll be damned if I’m going to let it go to waste. We’re going to go out for pizza and we’re going to go to a movie and we’re going to have some fun, got it?”
Pax found himself smiling back. “All right.”
“Good. Now shut up and get over here,” said Scarlett.
“What?” said Pax. He walked over to her. “Why?”
Scarlett wrapped her hand around him and knelt down. “Because there are a whole lot of other things I haven’t done before, either.”
Inside Scarlett’s mind, in a small Pacha of her own creating, Akllana’chikni’pai whirled in place, her blades hacking again and again through the tentacles of negative energy that filled the girl’s body and soul. She didn’t know how long she had been fighting and it didn’t matter. All that mattered was keeping the tentacles at bay. Her form was moving itself now, her mind partially detached as it searched for a way to break free of the black, slimy tentacles that kept on attacking.
There are too many of them, Akllana’chikni’pai thought as she whirled through her pacha again. It was an observation, not an admission of surrender. There are too many of them to just be coming from the girl. So where are they coming from? Her swords swept the pacha again, slashing through the black forest in a tornado of blades. Another dozen tentacles appeared to replace the ones she’d cut.
And more importantly, how do I break free of them?
Three hours later, Pax realized he had absolutely nothing to wear.
They’d had sex a dozen times, in about 20 different positions and in six different bodies, which was both cool and really odd.
Scarlett had figured it out first. She’d been lying down, gasping with effort and pleasure after their second time. Smiling at him, she’d said, “It’s a good thing you’re not any bigger, or I wouldn’t be able to close my legs.” Pax had laughed, pleased, and lain back on the bed. Scarlett was silent for a bit and then said, “Hey, Pax?”
“Yeah?”
“Why couldn’t you be bigger?” She sat up, looking down at her breasts. “Or me. Why can’t I have bigger tits? Or a tighter ass? Or a different face for that matter?”
Pax rolled over to look at her. “What do you mean? That’s the face you were…” He stopped as the realization dawned on him. They weren’t human anymore. They were astral. In theory, their bodies could be whatever they wanted them to be. He looked down at his penis, temporarily limp and thought about it. He closed his eyes, willing it to be larger.
“You’re hard again,” said Scarlett.
“I’m just getting started,” said Pax. He kept his eyes closed, willing his body to grow and change, to fill in all the pieces as Terry had taught. He felt his body shifting.
“Holy cow!” said Scarlett. “Stop there!”
Pax stopped, opened his eyes, and looked down. It was a fair bit larger and still hard. Scarlett’s eyes were wide. Pax grinned at her. “Yes?”
Scarlett licked her lips, swallowed, and said, “Yes. Definitely yes. Oh, yes.”
When they finished that time, Scarlett tried it next, making her breasts and ass curvier. Pax changed to look like a bodybuilder. Scarlett made herself look like a couple of her favorite movie stars, big-eyed, plump-lipped, and pouting. From then on, it had been a free-for-all, with both of them changing shapes two or three times each session until, finally, their energy wore down and they retreated to what they thought of as their own bodies.
“Ow,” said Scarlett. “That last time. Definitely ow.”
“In a good way?” asked Pax.
“In a very, very good way,” said Scarlett. She stretched languorously, imagining days of sex with Pax, nights of going out with the face of a supermodel. “How are you?”
“I think I’m spent,” said Pax. “All the shape changes really drained my energy. Especially that last one.”
“Me, too,” said Scarlett. “How do women walk with breasts that big?” She smiled. “Hey, want to go out for pizza?”
“I do,” said Pax. He sat up, looked around, and realized it. “Fuck. I have no clothes. At all.”
“Shit, neither do I,” said Scarlett. “What do we do? I can’t go home like this.” A sudden thought struck her. “Should I go home? At all, I mean? After what happened?”
“I think so,” said Pax. “As far as everyone knows, you’re all right, and I’ve had a miraculous recovery. Terry made it that way. So you should go home so no one worries about anything.”
“But I have no clothes either.” She fell back on the bed. “Of all the stupid things…”
“You can wear my mom’s clothes,” said Pax. “And you can go out and get me some. From a secondhand store or something.”
“With what?” asked Scarlett. “We don’t have any money.”
“Shit,” Pax kicked himself mentally for not taking his mother’s wallet when they left the hospital. “Maybe there’s some in here.”
They didn’t have to look hard. Pax’s mother kept her spare cash in a box in the top drawer. There was nearly $200 there in various slightly crumpled bills. Scarlett went through the closets next and found a denim skirt that wasn’t too long and a T-shirt that would fit. She put them both on and went out, leaving Pax alone, sex-stained and naked in his mother’s bedroom.
The thought was slightly creepy. To get over it, Pax got up and took a shower.
It was his first shower by himself, without having his mother or a nurse or anyone else watching him, in a long, long time. It was wonderful. He stayed in there for nearly half an hour, just for the joy of standing under near-scalding water and not feeling tired or in pain.
He wondered what he was going to do next.
He didn’t need to go to high school, not really. When he’d realized he was dying, he’d gotten his diploma from his hospital bed. He’d finished the entire degree in the space of a year. He’d audited online university courses and was about a quarter of the way through a bachelor’s degree. It would come in handy, he supposed. Since he had to work for a living…
“I don’t even know how long I’m going to live,” Pax realized. “If they block off the Earth, I’m a dead man, but if they don’t? Then what?”
He looked down at his hands. He remembered what his body had looked like when he’d first changed. It had been all titanium and power. Now it was just human.
Pax tried to change back. He couldn’t. He didn’t have the power.
Terry pulled extra power from Scarlett, Pax remembered. Can I pull power from something? He sifted back through his memory and realized that, good as it was before, now it was absolutely perfect. He could see everything that had happened, from the way Scarlett had shot fire out of her mouth to the grass changing color and curling up in flame under her feet. He narrowed his memories, feeling that moment when Terry pulled the power from Scarlett.
Pax reached out with his mind to the heat coming from the water. He could see the energy pouring from it, now that he was concentrating. He frowned and concentrated on pulling energy into himself.
The water turned freezing cold.
Pax yelped and stumbled, nearly falling over backward. His hand hit the wall behind him with a clank. He looked down at it and saw it was once more titanium. He grinned in spite of himself.
Ten minutes later, he was standing on the balcony, letting the last of the day’s sunlight shine on his naked body. He figured that 20 stories up, no one would notice, and besides, he had more important things to worry about. He could pull energy from the sunlight, bringing it into his body and charging it up like a battery.
An hour later, he could change shape at will once more.
Half an hour after that, Scarlett came back with clothes and pizza.
Terkun’shuks’pai landed on a beach on a small island in the Caribbean. On a whim he took human form—Japanese face and body, traditional Japanese clothes—even though he didn’t really need to do so. He followed the shoreline where the waves sucked at the sand. His hakama dragged against his ankles, wet and soaking up salt; his widespread toes balanced on the sand, savoring its steady polishing against his skin and the sharp pains from the small black rocks underfoot.
It took less than an hour, even though he had to take a few small detours around clumps of palm trees that leaned precariously over the white sand and into the ocean as if watching for ships.
Seagulls chirruped and squeaked behind him. They flew in from the reef to the southwest, holding bright gold and blue and orange reef fish in their beaks to feed to the spotted, blunt-beaked chicks tucked into shadowed crevices in the island’s one ridge of black, igneous rock. Petrels and shearwaters roosted on a few boulders left unclaimed by the seagulls. The high rocks descended into a greedy wall of jostling trees. Rice rats slept in nests. A porcupine dozed with one eye open in the hollowed trunk of a nearby limbo tree. Smoke rose from the huts along the southeast side of the island, but the local fauna had never been taught to fear forest fires and slept on. The specks of a handful of vultures, more attuned to cycles of violence among other species, circled in from a nearby island.
The water near the shore shone green with black specks of rock and abruptly turned deep blue as the island under the surface retreated to the depths. Long curls of white tipped into the shallows, collapsing before they became jeweled ripples near the shore.
Terkun’shuks’pai walked out into the water, letting it close over his head. He kept a comfortable pace, slipping through the water as if it were air, much to the surprise of the many fish and a few small sharks he startled on the way.
He reached the edge of the shallows and stared down into the depths. It was easily a hundred feet deep. More than deep enough to prevent discovery in the next twelve hours, which was really all the time it would need.
A thought opened a portal to another place in the universe. A second allowed him to pull a single egg, ripe for hatching, from a cluster of others and transport it to where he stood in the water. He wrapped it in warmth as it arrived to hurry the hatching.
He released it to gently sink down to the ocean floor, some hundred feet below.
It would hatch in the next hour, he knew.
And by the next sunrise, well, it would be something very interesting indeed.
Now, thought Terkun’shuks’pai, I really should start looking for Akllana’chikni’pai. Assuming she decided to stay.
He reached out with his mind and located the other astral being in a fraction of a second. He smiled as he watched her spinning and cutting at the black tentacles. He thought briefly of rescuing her but left it alone. It was much better that she was where she was instead of nosing about in his business right now. Besides, the dark tentacles of negative energy hadn’t managed to destroy her.
Yet.
Chapter 8
Scarlett stood in front of the mirror in her room, looking at the new her.
She’d been awake all night because apparently astral bodies didn’t need to sleep. It was a bit of a surprise but not a bad one. Much better than when her parents announced she was grounded for not coming home for dinner or calling. She tried to say that her phone got broken at the hospital, and that she’d been with Pax who’d recovered and they’d gone out, but her parents hadn’t accepted it. She’d been late; she’d made them worry; and she should have known better. She was grounded for two weeks.
She’d groused and bitched and stomped up the stairs to her room, but she wasn’t really that upset. Just knowing what she could do was like a happiness motor in her chest. She’d always had fantasies of having “powers” of any kind. And always thought she was kind of pathetic for thinking about it so much. But now…She’d started to go online and talk to Pax about it all but remembered he didn’t have a laptop anymore.
So she’d surfed the web instead, hoping it would make her tired. It didn’t. What it did do, however, was make her realize she could remember everything she’d read, and she could read it really, really fast.
She went through every page she could find that explained math and physics and biology and all the other subjects she did badly at. She memorized Spanish grammar and read every book that was online from her courses. She had it all in her head, and she didn’t even feel tired or confused.
It was wonderful until she remembered she’d be going right back to school with all the miserable jerks she’d been dealing with for the past four years. There had to be a way to make that better.
That’s when she started wondering about what she should look like.
Pax had said—and he was right—that they shouldn’t make any big changes in their bodies. It would cause too much suspicion. Small changes, though, wouldn’t hurt. And while it wouldn’t be that noticeable to other people, to Scarlett it would make a real difference. So, as the morning light came through the window, Scarlett stood naked in front of the mirror, making adjustments.
A thought made her stomach flatter. Another made her ass tighter and a bit more round. A third made her breasts slightly more full—not bigger, just round enough to properly fill out her bra. She made her back stronger so her shoulders didn’t hunch and her neck didn’t go forward. Then she did her skin, removing every blemish. When she was done, she turned a full circle, admiring her work.
I look good, she decided. Not super pretty, but good.
Good enough for high school, anyway. And when that’s done, I can look like whatever I want.
Her alarm went off. She grabbed a shower because that’s what she always did, and she ate breakfast with her parents and felt the food inside her converting entirely to energy, without waste, like the pizza had last night. The thought that she’d never need to go to the bathroom again was at once happy and confusing. She looked at her parents—their greasy skin, bags under their eyes, tight mouths—and her nosy little sister and wondered if she would outlive them all now. Did astral bodies even die? She had no idea.
Her father left for work, and she walked her little sister to school. Her sister was whining about some kids in her class, and Scarlett listened, feeling much more empathetic than usual. Her sister was as trapped as she had been in this family and school. What a joke! The best years of your life, supposedly, and everyone’s scared, angry, fighting all the time. Scarlett thought seriously about ditching class, but then she’d get in more trouble with her parents and she didn’t need that right now. She needed to be left alone to explore all the changes. She’d call Pax at his mother’s place and let him know what was happening. With luck she could slip out at night and go see him.
She smiled at her memories of the night before. If she’d known sex was going to be that good…
Nearly grinning, she headed for school.
Pax walked to the hospital that morning. It was odd, walking on the street, surrounded by people. He was so used to the quiet of the hospital bed in the morning, the sounds of the nurses going on their business, and the doctors talking to one another as they did their rounds. The massive crowd around him sent wave after wave of noise through the air and through Pax’s body. He was at once thrilled and overwhelmed by it.
When he reached the front door to the hospital, Pax realized that, more than anything else, he didn’t want to go in. He hated the hospital. Hated it more than anything else in the world. Hated it so much he’d longed for death as much to escape the damn hospital as to escape the pain he was in.
I’m not a patient this time, he thought. I’m here to visit a patient. Nothing else.
It
still took him ten minutes to walk through the doors and another ten minutes to find his mother. He didn’t really know the layout of the place the way he’d thought. Of course, I spent most of the time in one ward.
The Cardiac ICU was a busy place. The nurses were constantly checking patients’ vital signs and making notes. The doctors carefully circulated through the space, and the patients lay quietly in their beds. Most were recovering. Some were failing. With a thrill, Pax realized he could tell which ones were which just by looking at them. He found his mother’s room and, after a moment to make himself calm down, stepped inside.
Dr. Julie Black’s eyes locked on her son the moment he stepped into the room. He was… healthy.
He should be dead.
He was absurdly healthy. He looked like a normal teenager, in his blue jeans and t-shirt and hoodie and old running shoes. His face was pale, but not pale from illness or exhaustion, just the pale of someone who spends too much time inside and not enough in sunlight. He stood tall and seemed to give off a strength that was patently absurd because he should be dead!
“Hi, Mom,” said Pax.
Even his voice sounded healthy and strong. It was all Julie could do not to scream, “What the fuck happened to you?” Beside her, her monitor beeped out the acceleration of her heart. She forced her breath to slow, forced it to be calm. When she could speak, she said, “Hello, Pax.”
“I heard you had a heart attack,” said Pax. “Are you all right?”
“I will be, yes,” said Julie. “I heard you got out of bed and left the hospital. That you checked yourself out.”
“I did.”
“How?” The word came out colder than she meant it to, but she couldn’t help herself. “You were dying, Pax. You were days away from terminal heart failure with a condition that cannot reverse itself, and now, what, you’re just fine?”